Is the Voting Rights Law in Jeopardy?

Conservative justices and challengers from Alabama, supported by other opponents of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, suggest that 47 years of federal supervision of certain states’ voting practices is long enough, that such oversight deprives the monitored state of its right to freely conduct its own elections.

Putting aside that Congressional hearings as recently as 2006 have found a continuing need for the supervision and for prior approval of changes required by Section 5 of the act, we should not forget that most of the states affected by the act spent nearly 100 years ignoring or subverting the clear meaning of the 14th and 15th Amendments, thereby depriving millions of African-Americans of their voting rights.

JOHN E. COLBERT Chicago, Feb. 28, 2013

The writer is a lawyer.

To the Editor:

Statements from two Supreme Court justices during the oral argument regarding Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act demonstrate why we still need this law.

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CreditOliver Munday

First, Justice Antonin Scalia said the statute amounted to a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Ending racial discrimination was not and still is not the same as an entitlement.

Justice Scalia also should not belittle our democratically elected officials, who only seven years ago held hearings, took testimony and then decided nearly unanimously that racial discrimination in voting still existed in specific parts of the country where Section 5 applies. We elected them, not the court, to make such findings.

Similarly, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. takes the court far beyond its legitimate bounds when he asked if “the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North.” Section 5 does not identify states and counties and label them “racist,” a term as charged and misused as “entitlement.” Rather, the act asks if the vestiges of racial discrimination in voting have ended. Where Congress determined it has not, it extended Section 5.

STEPHEN F. GOLD Philadelphia, Feb. 28, 2013

The writer is a civil rights and public interest lawyer.

To the Editor:

What began in 1965 with Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous words “I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy” would appear to be on the verge of ending with Justice Antonin Scalia’s soon to be infamous words calling the same Voting Rights Act a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Never before has our country so glaringly appeared on a backward track.

JESSE ALBERT Los Angeles, Feb. 28, 2013

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Is the Voting Rights Law in Jeopardy?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe